The Office of the Provost, in conjunction with the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study, sponsors year-long fellowships for Brown University faculty members to conduct research on Brown University's historical legacy.
This fellowship in University History represents Brown's ongoing commitment to uncovering and understanding its institutional history through scholarly research and community engagement. One fellowship is awarded per year.
In support of work on their project, the fellow receives one-course release during the fellowship year, research funds of $2,500, and the support of one Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award (UTRA) to assist with research activities. Fellows become integral members of the JNBC scholarly community, participating in seminars and other intellectual activities.
Peering into wastewater for public health has a history dating back at least to the late 19th century, when a biologist in Boston cultured sewage in beef jelly, bouillon, boiled potatoes, and milk to see if anything would grow. Later, scientists in Scotland looked at wastewater to assess the spread of typhoid. After injecting monkeys with sewage in the 1930s, American researchers realized that wastewater polio virus concentrations correlated with community infections. It was the COVID-19 pandemic, however, that led to skyrocketing investment in wastewater disease surveillance in the United States—this time with the aid of modern biotechnology and without bouillon or monkeys.
As COVID transitioned from a deadly novelty to something closer to a mundane nuisance, testing for the virus fell off a cliff. Wastewater surveillance became central to public health officials’ ability to track COVID. The same is true for other threats, like H5N1 avian influenza. Bird flu has now spread from wild birds, to poultry, to cattle, and, worryingly, to a wide variety of other mammals, including people. Still testing remains limited. The federal government has invested at least $500 million in building wastewater-surveillance capacity since 2021. But that funding expires in September. Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist who is the director of The Brown University Pandemic Center, told me we may soon be left with an even murkier understanding of how diseases like COVID and bird flu are spreading.
With the United States facing its largest single measles outbreak in 25 years, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will direct federal health agencies to explore potential new treatments for the disease, including vitamins, according to an H.H.S. spokesman. The decision is the latest in a series of actions by the nation’s top health official that experts fear will undermine public confidence in vaccines as an essential public health tool.
The announcement comes as Mr. Kennedy faces intense backlash for his handling ofthe outbreak. It has swept through large areas of the Southwest where vaccination rates are low, infecting hundreds and killing two young girls. On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported more than 930 cases nationwide, most of which are associated with the Southwest outbreak.
Eight Brown faculty members were elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences this year alongside 240 other individuals, the Academy announced on April 23.
The Academy, which was founded in 1780, honors interdisciplinary scholars who are innovative leaders in their fields. Every year, the Academy elects new members who will engage in “cross-disciplinary efforts to produce reflective, independent and pragmatic studies that inform public policy and advance the public good,” according to its website.
In this episode, Joseph Harris explores the actions taken by the Trump administration to dismantle U.S. foreign aid and the consequences that these actions will have for global health. He sits down with Dr. Beth Cameron, a former Senior Adviser to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID); Nidhi Bouri, former Deputy Assistant Administrator at USAID; Dr. Brooke Nichols, Associate Professor of Global Health at Boston University and creator of as U.S. aid freeze impact tracker; and Sheena Adams, Global Communications Director for The Accountability Lab, which launched its own Global Aid Freeze Tracker.
Soon after President Donald J. Trump took office for his second term, thousands of health websites run by the federal government that kept the public informed about infectious diseases, mental health, vaccines and more were taken offline.
Many eventually returned — in large part because a judge ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to temporarily restore the pages — but some had been altered, with sections on topics such as health equity and teen pregnancy deleted. The changes, along with uncertainty around the future of these sites, has led some public health experts to question whether the websites can still be trusted as the gold standard of trustworthy health information, as they’ve long been regarded.
Federal health agencies are already facing a crisis of confidence. When a recent national poll asked respondents how much trust they had in the C.D.C. to make the right health recommendations, more than one-third replied “not much” or “not at all.” Nearly half said the same about the Food and Drug Administration.
Experts fear that with less trust in public health institutions, more people seeking medical information might turn to social media, where misinformation is rampant. That has made it all the more valuable for the public to find evidenced-based sources of health information.
Here are five websites run by independent organizations that have accurate, easy-to-understand information.
The vacuum left by the US threatens irreparable damage to global health institutions, with the WHO bearing a disproportionate burden. The organisation must view this crisis as an opportunity to develop into an entity that is leaner with greater agency to carry out its most essential, life-saving tasks.
The World Health Organization (WHO) is in a moment of crisis. The decision by the US to withdraw from the organisation leaves the WHO with a deficit of about 15% of its total funding through the end of 2025 and 45% projected for 2026-27.
With their election to the prestigious honor society, eight members of the Brown University faculty join the nation’s leading scholars in science, public affairs, business, arts and the humanities.
Significant changes to the way commercial operations raise and product poultry may need to occur to stop the current outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI).
“Farms were built for efficiency. They were built for production. They weren’t necessarily built for disease control or biosecurity in mind,” Kay Russo, DVM, partner/veterinarian, RSM Consulting, said during the April 12 webinar, “What we know (or don’t) about H5N1 transmission on farms,” hosted by The Pandemic Center, part of the Brown University School of Public Health.
WASHINGTON, April 22, 2025: The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) announced today that Dr. Elizabeth (Beth) Cameron and Dr. Stephanie Psaki have been appointed as non-resident senior advisers with the CSIS Global Health Policy Center.
Cameron and Psaki are global leaders in health security and biodefense with experience across academia, nonprofit organizations, and in government, including establishing global health security missions at the White House. Dr. Cameron is a professor of the practice and senior advisor to the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health. Dr. Psaki recently joined the Brown School of Public Health as a distinguished senior fellow and formerly served as special assistant to the president and the inaugural U.S. coordinator for global health security at the White House.
According to attendees at Stanford’s first-ever Forum on Sustainable and Healthy Buildings, clean and well-ventilated indoor air should be considered as essential to public health as clean water. From March 30 to April 1, the conference served as a rare cross-sector convention focused on advancing national indoor air quality (IAQ) by minimizing indoor pollutants.
Over two days, 24 stakeholders from institutions like the California Department of Public Health, U.S. Green Building Council and the International WELL Building Institute debated the most effective actions to implement IAQ guidelines that could soon be monitored in commercial and residential buildings.
Influenza epidemics, a major contributor to global morbidity and mortality, are influenced by climate factors including absolute humidity and temperature. Climate change is expected to increase the frequency and severity of climate extremes, potentially impacting the duration and magnitude of future influenza epidemics. However, the extent of these projected effects on influenza outbreaks remains understudied. Here, we use an epidemiologic model adapted for temperate and tropical climates to explore how climate variability may affect seasonal influenza. Using climate anomalies derived from historical data, we found that simulated periods of anomalous climate conditions impacted both the projected influenza outbreak peak size and the total proportion infected, with the strongest effects observed when the anomaly was included just before the typical peak. Effects varied by climate: temperate regions showed a unimodal relationship, while tropical climates exhibited a nonlinear pattern. Our results emphasize that the intensity of weather extremes is key to understanding how climate change may affect influenza outbreaks, laying the groundwork for utilizing weather variability as a potential early warning for influenza activity.
Of the many mistakes made in the COVID era, none were as glaring as prolonged school closures. The damages go beyond loss of learning, a dire consequence in its own right: Millions of families, both children and parents, still carry the scars of stress, depression, and isolation.
The closures began at a time of understandable panic, but that was only the beginning of the story. On February 25, 2020, Nancy Messonnier, the director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, led a press conference to address the developing coronavirus crisis. Messonnier warned the public that, without vaccines, non-pharmaceutical interventions—things like business closures or social-distancing guidelines—would be the most important tools in the country’s response. “What is appropriate for one community seeing local transmission won’t necessarily be appropriate for a community where no local transmission has occurred,” she said. The school closures that would be implemented the following month—and that endured through the end of the school year in nearly all of the roughly 13,800 school districts in the United States, in regions that had wildly different infection levels—showed this directive was not followed.
Emerging and/or re-emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) in the East Africa region are associated with climate change-induced environmental drivers. There is a need for a comprehensive understanding of these environmental drivers and to adopt an integrated risk analysis (IRA) framework for addressing a combination of the biological, environmental and socioeconomic factors that increase population vulnerabilities to EID risks to inform biological risk mitigation and cross-sectoral decision-making. The aim of this integrative review was to identify knowledge gaps and contribute to a holistic understanding about the environmental drivers of Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever virus (CCHFV), Marburg virus (MARV) and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) infections in the East Africa Region to improve IRA processes at the environment-animal-human exposure interface.
THREE PEOPLE HAVE DIED in Texas and more than five hundred have gotten sick in what is shaping up as the largest single measles outbreak in decades. And somehow Robert F. Kennedy Jr. still hasn’t provided a firm, unambiguous endorsement of vaccination, although you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise in light of the publicity around an interview he had with CBS News last week.
The interview aired on Wednesday, after Kennedy had met with the families of two Texas girls who recently died from the disease. The online version carried the headline “RFK Jr. says people should get the measles vaccine,” and if you happened to be on social media at the time (like I was) then some version of it probably popped onto your feeds.
The blue rubber gloves and N95 masks in a Seattle senior living community used to mark a time of isolation, fear, loss.
Yet on a recent afternoon at Merrill Gardens in Ballard, these medical supplies are more like ornaments of the past, strung across the ceiling as an almost whimsical ode to how far we’ve come.
It’s been five years since the mysterious respiratory virus responsible for an emerging pandemic was identified in Washington state and the U.S., and forced millions of us, including hundreds of Merrill Gardens residents in the Northwest, to shut in, avoid physical contact and distance from one another for months.
Not today. On this particular gray Friday, residents and staffers are celebrating. Along with the PPE garlands, a colorful banner is pinned up in the window: “Heroes Work Here.”
“We didn’t lose a single person during COVID,” general manager Lisa Palm said, speaking just of the Ballard living facility, to a room of cheering residents. All were unmasked.
She raised a glass of Champagne. “Cheers to all that being in the past.”
Aggressive deportation tactics have terrorized farmworkers at the center of the nation’s bird flu strategy, public health workers say.
Dairy and poultry workers have accounted for most cases of the bird flu in the U.S. — and preventing and detecting cases among them is key to averting a pandemic. But public health specialists say they’re struggling to reach farmworkers because many are terrified to talk with strangers or to leave home.
“People are very scared to go out, even to get groceries,” said Rosa Yanez, an outreach worker at Strangers No Longer, a Detroit-based Catholic organization that supports immigrants and refugees in Michigan with legal and health problems, including the bird flu. “People are worried about losing their kids, or about their kids losing their parents.”
On Tuesday at a press conference, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said his department's handling of measles cases, including the outbreak in Texas should be a "model for the rest of the world."
Kennedy said this is because cases have exploded more drastically in Europe -- though he didn't offer specifics on what he thinks has worked in the U.S. response.
"I would compare it to what's happening in Europe," he said. "They've had 127,000 cases and 37 deaths. And so what we're doing here in the United States is a model for the rest of the world."
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seemed to imply in recent days that the measles outbreak in western Texas was slowing down.
In a post on X on Sunday, Kennedy remarked on the second death linked to the outbreak, which occurred in an unvaccinated school-aged child.
About 10 minutes later, Kennedy edited the post to add that the curve has been flattening since early March, when he started sending in reinforcements from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- supplying clinics with vaccines and other medications.
"Since that time, the growth rates for new cases and hospitalizations have flattened," he wrote.
Slipping vaccination rates in West Texas have led to the state's largest measles outbreak in over 30 years, with more than 500 patients affected as of April 8 and cases spreading to New Mexico and Oklahoma. Last week, an unvaccinated Texas child died from measles, marking the third death tied to the outbreak.
Public health experts say there is a playbook for slowing outbreaks like this one: Identify cases. Isolate patients. Track where they've been and who they may have exposed. Most of all, drive up the vaccination rate.
Dr. David Fleming spent last week learning of the scope of the cuts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, not through meetings with department officials or emails, but by text messages and news stories. As far as he knows, he said, there is still no official public list of the cuts. "This is unprecedented, both in the scale and scope of destruction of CDC, and unprecedented in the secret manner in which it's been being carried out," said Fleming, a public health professional in the state of Washington and chairman of the Advisory Committee to the Director of the CDC.
Read more at: https://www.macon.com/news/article303598321.html#storylink=cpy
Professor at Brown Univeristy School of Public Health and former CEO of GAVI, the vaccine alliance, Dr Seth Berkley championed equitable access to vaccines and co-founded Covax during the pandemic. In an interview with Sunday Times he watns of the repercussions of abrupt fund cuts
Excerpts:
As the Trump administration moves to dismantle international public health safeguards, pull funding from local health departments and legitimize health misinformation, some experts now fear that the country is setting the stage for a long-term measles resurgence.
If federal health officials do not change course, large multistate outbreaks like the one that has torn through West Texas, jumping to neighboring states and killing two people, may become the norm.
“We have really opened the door for this virus to come back,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
On April 1, the Trump administration began making sweeping changes to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) by firing thousands of staff, some of whom learned of this decision when they arrived at work on Tuesday morning and were not allowed to enter the building. According to HHS, the administration plans to reduce the HHS workforce from 82,000 full-time employees to 62,000. It is also consolidating the current 28 divisions into 15 divisions, and eliminating five of the 10 regional offices in the United States, among other changes.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. framed these changes as part of his “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, citing recent declines in life expectancy, while neglecting to mention that those declines were largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Trump administration’s stated goals are to streamline HHS, save taxpayer money, focus more on chronic illness, and make HHS more responsive and efficient. It claims it can make these reforms without impacting critical services. In practice, however, the administration has cut essential funding that was helping states and cities prepare for outbreaks; reassigned leaders who were stopping biological threats in other countries from spreading; undermined the United States’ ability to quickly review and approve treatments and vaccines during an emergency; and disrupted essential work to create vaccines, tests, and treatments for dangerous diseases. These approaches do not make America healthy. They make America less safe.
Jennifer Nuzzo, professor of epidemiology and director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University's School of Public Health, leads the conversation on complex public health emergencies.
This work represents the views and opinions solely of the author. The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher, and takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.
About this episode:
For 25 years, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance has been a global effort to purchase and distribute lifesaving vaccines to the poorest of countries and help them build up their health systems. Now, it’s the latest chop in a blitz of proposed federal funding cuts to global health. In this episode: an overview of Gavi’s innovative model that buys vaccines for 50% of the world’s children and has prevented around 19 million deaths, and the catastrophic potential if the U.S. withdraws its financial support.
Guest:
Dr. Seth Berkley is the former CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. He is a senior advisor to the Pandemic Center and an adjunct professor of the practice in epidemiology at the Brown University School of Public Health. His new book, Fair Doses, will be released next fall.
Host:
Stephanie Desmon, MA, is a former journalist, author, and the director of public relations and communications for the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs, the largest center at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Egg prices are dropping in the United States, pushing highly pathogenic avian influenza out of the political and economic spotlight. However, the disease won’t likely be cowed by the temporary reprieve, health experts have warned.
“I keep hearing a sort of a hope, a wish, and perhaps a belief ... that this is going to blow over,” Jennifer Nuzzo, the director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health, said at a panel focused on the U.S. experience with H5N1 bird flu. “I’m here to say that it’s not going to blow over somehow, that this is really a long-term situation that we have to deal with.”
Dallas, Texas – Therissa Grefsrud still remembers the email. The COVID-19 pandemic had been raging for nearly a year, and a woman had reached out to ask about vaccines: Would they cause infertility in her or her future children?
Grefsrud, a nurse specialised in infection prevention, had heard such concerns before. But studies show no link between infertility and vaccination of any kind.
Still, Grefsrud exchanged messages with the woman as she shared her fears. Then she pointed her towards the facts.
“She came to me about a month later and let me know how grateful she was for me making this space without judgement,” Grefsrud said. The woman also shared that she was now vaccinated.
Fast forward four years, and Grefsrud is among the healthcare professionals in Texas confronting a new outbreak: measles.
When Stephanie Psaki, a senior fellow in public health, joined the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in 2021, she was tasked with helping coordinate the government’s response to the global COVID-19 pandemic.
She then joined the National Security Council at the White House in the Biden-Harris administration where she worked for two and a half years. A scientist and an academic by training, she told The Herald she didn’t expect to move to this policy-focused role.
“I didn’t think that I was going to do this job when I was in undergrad or in grad school,” she said. “It never occurred to me.”
But now, Psaki has returned to academia, bringing her policy experience to Brown.
Leaders at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered staff this week not to release their experts’ assessment that found the risk of catching measles is high in areas near outbreaks where vaccination rates are lagging, according to internal records reviewed by ProPublica.
In an aborted plan to roll out the news, the agency would have emphasized the importance of vaccinating people against the highly contagious and potentially deadly disease that has spread to 19 states, the records show.
A CDC spokesperson told ProPublica in a written statement that the agency decided against releasing the assessment “because it does not say anything that the public doesn’t already know.” She added that the CDC continues to recommend vaccines as “the best way to protect against measles.”
But what the nation’s top public health agency said next shows a shift in its long-standing messaging about vaccines, a sign that it may be falling in line under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime critic of vaccines:
The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have begun cancelling billions of dollars in funding for research related to COVID-19.
COVID-19 research funds “were issued for a limited purpose: to ameliorate the effects of the pandemic,” according to an internal NIH document that Nature has obtained and that provides the agency’s staff members with updated guidance on how to terminate these grants. “Now that the pandemic is over, the grant funds are no longer necessary,” the document states. It is not clear how many of these grants will be ended.
What are the biggest threats to the health security of the American people? There are some strong candidates. Avian influenza is spreading in birds, cattle, and 50 mammalian species. Measles cases are surging at home and abroad. COVID-19 is still spreading and could mutate into a more deadly strain. Farther afield, Uganda continues to respond to an Ebola outbreak and Mpox has been seen in 127 countries. But perhaps the biggest threat to America’s health could be self-inflicted. According to a report published yesterday in the New York Times, our leaders intend to end funding for international immunization programs—including the Gavi Alliance I led from 2011 to 2023—that for decades have protected Americans from health threats abroad. These cuts would represent a grave threat to the health, well-being, and livelihoods of every American.
The United States cutting funding to Gavi, an organisation that provides vaccines to the world's poorest countries, could result in more than a million deaths and will endanger lives everywhere, the group's CEO warned on Thursday.
The news that Washington is planning to end funding for Gavi, first reported in the New York Times, comes as the two-month-old administration of President Donald Trump aggressively slashes foreign aid.
The decision was included in a 281-page spreadsheet that the severely downsized United States Agency for International Development sent to Congress on Monday night.
The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have begun cancelling billions of dollars in funding on research related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
COVID-19 research funds “were issued for a limited purpose: to ameliorate the effects of the pandemic”, according to an internal NIH document that Nature has obtained and that provides the agency’s staff members with updated guidance on how to terminate these grants. “Now that the pandemic is over, the grant funds are no longer necessary,” the document states. It is not clear how many COVID-19 grants will be terminated.
A project to track and contain menacing animal viruses across seven countries, from avian influenza in poultry to Lassa virus in rodents, ended with a single email. In late January, Jonathon Gass, an epidemiologist and virologist at Tufts University, was about to leave for Bangladesh to close out an effort to monitor and combat avian influenza, when the emailed letter arrived from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), ordering an immediate halt to work on the $100 million STOP Spillover project. Gass, a co-deputy director of the project, stayed in Massachusetts and started to call staff around the world to tell them to drop everything. One colleague monitoring Lassa virus in Liberia was driving to a field site. “I had to tell him that he needed to turn the car around, come back, and book a plane ticket home,” Gass says.
The White House is nominating Dr. Susan Monarez, the current acting director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to lead the agency, President Donald Trump said Monday.
The move comes weeks after the White House abruptly withdrew its nomination of Dr. Dave Weldon to lead the public health agency.
After returning home from a trip abroad last week, an infant in Houston was hospitalized with measles.
In Lamoille County, Vermont, this month, a child became sick with measles after returning from foreign travel.
The same thing happened to an adult in Oakland County, Michigan, whose vaccination status was unknown.
Although measles was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000, it still rages on in many parts of the world. With decreasing vaccination rates across the US, experts say, imported cases can have large consequences.
“Each one of those imported cases now is like a match being thrown into a bit of forest,” said Dr. Brian Ward, associate director of the JD MacLean Tropical Disease Center at McGill University. “The susceptible people in our communities now are like that accumulating fuel in a forest.”
Often, these illnesses happen “because a US resident goes outside of the US and is exposed and brings measles back. And I think that’s something that’s been happening for a while, and we’re certainly seeing … an upward trend in the last couple of years,” said Dr. Matthew Ferrari, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at Penn State University.
The outbreak spanning Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma is behind the majority of the more than 400 US measles cases this year, according to a CNN tally, but there have been many reports of travel-related cases throughout the country.
Without US funding, there has been immediate disruption to controlling the mpox outbreak. Now is the time for global health leaders, philanthropic organisations and other high-income nations to step up and fill the void left by the funding withdrawal.
The viral zoonotic disease mpox (formerly known as monkeypox) has periodically affected African nations since its discovery in 1958.
Historically, it remained confined to specific regions, primarily within central and west Africa. However, the outbreak that began in 2022 marked a significant escalation, with cases spreading beyond usual endemic regions. By mid-2022, the virus had reached multiple continents, prompting the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare a public health emergency of international concern in early May, 2022. Unlike previous outbreaks, the 2022-2023 epidemic saw a significant number of cases in Europe and the Americas.
Egg prices have risen 50% since March 2024, the result of an ongoing bird flu crisis that has both producers and consumers grappling for solutions. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 166 million chickens have been infected and killed in the past three years, which means there are fewer egg-laying chickens, reduced supply, and higher prices. Mandatory culling, inadequate government reimbursement, and prevention costs have led to $1.4 billion in losses for the poultry industry, hurting both farmers and everyday Americans. But despite these soaring costs, the U.S. is about to sunset a relatively affordable, very effective tool we have for stopping bird flu — and other deadly viruses.
Measles is like a fire that spreads incredibly fast. It's one of the most contagious diseases.
And the last thing you'd want to do in a fire scenario is get rid of smoke detectors, says Jennifer Nuzzo, director of Brown University's Pandemic Center. But, she says, that's exactly what's happening now, just as measles cases rise in the U.S. and other countries.
She's talking about the U.S. decision to stop funding the Global Measles and Rubella Laboratory Network.
"It's our surveillance infrastructure. You can think of it like the smoke detectors that tell us where the fires are, so that we know how to respond to it," says Nuzzo. "So this is obviously devastating and it's particularly devastating given how many countries are struggling with measles [outbreaks]."
Devex sat down with the former head of Gavi to discuss the difficult times ahead as the foreign aid landscape drastically changes; what this could mean for the health of the world's population, and where priorities should lie.
The health of the world’s population exists on shaky grounds amid widespread cuts in foreign aid and the U.S.’s withdrawal from global cooperation.
Berkley served as head of Gavi from 2011 to 2023, and now works in advisory roles for organizations, such as the Serum Institute of India, in areas such as vaccines, and other interventions for diseases impacting low- and middle-income countries.
His tenure at Gavi included a tumultuous period where there was extraordinary need for international solidarity and cooperation: The COVID-19 pandemic. This cooperation was present in some ways as countries banded together to create COVAX, the world’s attempt at vaccine equity — which Berkley led. But in other ways, it fell completely flat, including when wealthy countries hoarded vaccines.
On the 5th anniversary of COVID-19’s arrival, Professor Jennifer Nuzzo delivered a Presidential Faculty Award lecture on the U.S. response to COVID, the infectious disease threats we face today and the steps needed to prepare for the public health emergencies of tomorrow.
Dr. Craig Spencer, a Brown University School of Public Health professor, discusses the greater implications of Elon Musk's DOGE cuts in the health sector.
Now is the time to continue the momentum towards achieving African vaccine sovereignty. We must work to both increase the continent’s vaccine manufacturing capacity and then develop strategies to promote their uptake.
Five years to the day after the World Health Organization first referred to Covid-19 as a pandemic, the US National Institutes of Health slashed grant funding for projects that aim to understand vaccine hesitancy and promote vaccine uptake. The Covid-19 pandemic and more recent outbreaks of mpox, Marburg and Ebola underline the importance of regionalised vaccine manufacturing to ensure access to vaccines for people in Africa. Yet, without research to inform strategies to improve trust in vaccines and promote their uptake, the gains in manufacturing will not translate to lives saved.
Defunding research that aims to improve vaccine uptake is another historic mistake in what has become a sad litany of health science reversals by the Trump administration. In January 2025, before the funding cuts were announced, leading vaccine researchers from around the world published an article calling for countries to measure the social and behavioural reasons that people choose to get vaccinated or not and to use this information to design approaches to improve vaccine uptake. Heeding this call is now more important than ever to ensure that the vaccines produced in Africa are taken up by those who can benefit from them – otherwise what is the point?
We must work to both increase African vaccine manufacturing capacity and develop strategies to promote their uptake once they are made. Currently, only 1.1% of Africa’s vaccine supply is produced locally. This overdependence on foreign vaccine supplies leaves African people vulnerable. This challenge is heightened by the inequity in access to foreign supplies, a disparity that became especially evident during the Covid-19 pandemic. While the Covid vaccination campaign was the largest and fastest in history, Africa faced significant challenges in access and distribution. By November 2022, almost two years after high-income countries began vaccinating their citizens, only 25% of the people in Africa had been fully vaccinated against Covid-19.
At the beginning of the pandemic, initiatives such as the Covax facility, a global Covid-19 vaccine procurement mechanism, signalled positive steps towards global solidarity for equitable vaccine access. Although this effort was highly commendable, the reality was very different. Gavin Yamey, the director of Duke University’s Center for Policy Impact in Global Health who was involved in the early discussions about Covax, declared that “rich countries behaved worse than anyone’s worst nightmares”. Wealthy countries were first in line to receive vaccines because they were able to place orders for multiple candidates in their early stages of development. Hoarding of these vaccines led to what World Health Organization (WHO) director-general Tedros Ghebreyesus called “vaccine apartheid”, as booster doses of the Covid-19 vaccine were widespread in high-income countries before people in low-income countries had even received a first dose.
Once vaccines are available on the African continent, how can policymakers be sure that the regulatory process for their approval, technical expertise to run clinical trials, and health workforce to administer vaccines are in place to be able to ensure that vaccines reach those who need them? For example, the response to the current mpox public health emergency of international concern has been plagued by delays in authorisation for the vaccine and limited data on the effectiveness of these vaccines in children.
The ongoing challenges with vaccine access in Africa continue to cause preventable loss of life even though it is well established that early access to vaccines in an outbreak can stop a virus in its tracks. Strengthening vaccine manufacturing capacity on the continent will ensure long-term health security across the continent. Promising efforts are already under way that must be supported and expanded, particularly in light of uncertainties surrounding US funding for global health. As of late 2024, there were five African vaccine suppliers in four countries – South Africa (Aspen Pharmacare and Biovac), Senegal (Institut Pasteur de Dakar), Morocco (Marbio) and Egypt (Vacsera) – with scaled facilities that are close to commercialisation. A further 20 suppliers across the continent are in development or awaiting technology transfer.
In 2021, the African Union announced its goal of supporting the African vaccine manufacturing industry to produce more than 60% of the vaccine doses required on the continent by 2040. The Partnerships for African Vaccine Manufacturing was created under the Africa CDC in 2021 to achieve this goal and was expanded in 2024 to include all health products under a new name, the Platform for Harmonized African Health Products Manufacturing. As of June 2024, there are 25 active vaccine projects across the continent. Initiatives such as the WHO’s mRNA technology transfer hub and those supported by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (Cepi) also have been working to increase African vaccine manufacturing, and fostering vaccine sovereignty.
In 2024, major African-led initiatives were launched to accelerate African vaccine manufacturing. The African Vaccine Manufacturing Accelerator received a $1.2-billion investment, through reallocated Covid-19 funds from other country’s governments and philanthropies, to expand vaccine manufacturing on the continent, Afreximbank pledged $2-billion in support of African Health Products Manufacturing, and regulatory bodies from seven African countries signed a memorandum of understanding to promote a strong, harmonised regulatory system on the continent.
Countries including Rwanda are also setting a strong example. Leveraging a tremendous amount of preparation and partnerships with the private sector and global public health organisations such as Cepi, just 10 days after the outbreak was declared, Rwanda implemented clinical trials of the Sabin mpox vaccine.
Achieving self-reliance in vaccine production in Africa is possible. In combination with continued efforts to understand and promote vaccine uptake, we need whole-of-government approaches that support the growth of vaccine manufacturing on the continent. The ministries of health and finance must work together to develop strategic approaches for preferential procurement practices of regionally produced vaccines. There needs to be harmonisation of the regulatory bodies on the continent with the WHO’s prequalification process – an approval process required for vaccines to be bought by UN agencies such as Unicef – so that safe and effective vaccines can reach populations in need and at scale.
Now is the time to continue the momentum towards achieving African vaccine sovereignty. These efforts will save lives if people have the confidence and trust to take them. DM
Margaret Dunne is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Epidemiology; Thokozani Liwewe a medical doctor and global health professional working with the Ministry of Health, Malawi, and a Game Changers Fellow; Alice Im is a research assistant; Andrea Uhlig is a research associate; Carly Gasca is a project director; and Wilmot James is a professor and senior adviser – all at the Pandemic Center in Brown University’s School of Public Health, Providence, Rhode Island.
If you ask anyone, they remember the exact moment that they realized that COVID-19 was going to change the world. For most of us, that moment came during the second week of March 2020. Schools were shut down. Many jobs became remote. But by the time most of our lives were changed by the pandemic, public health experts had already spent weeks or even months trying to stop the spread.
The CDC has historically been the backbone of US public health, delivering essential resources, guidance, and disease surveillance to state and local health departments. However, as the agency faces workforce reductions and funding cuts, public health experts warn about the unsettling future of infectious disease preparedness, response efforts, and access to vital health care programs. The consequences of these changes could be catastrophic, jeopardizing our safeguards against outbreaks and public health crises.
Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.
This week marks the fifth anniversary of COVID being declared a global pandemic. So much changed about all our lives then that we are still feeling five years later.
As we reflect on this anniversary, our producer Fonda Mwangi took a pulse check on where the U.S. public health system is now and the lessons it’s learned.